SCOTUS tosses mistress-poisoning conviction

A Pennsylvania woman’s federal chemical-weapons conviction for attempting to poison her husband’s mistress was invalid, the Supreme Court held unanimously Monday.

But a majority of the court’s justices declined pleas from conservatives to rule on the precise reach of Congress’s power to punish crimes usually considered part of the bread-and-butter of local law enforcement.

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The case was brought to the court by Carol Bond, a Pennsylvania microbiologist arrested in 2007 for allegedly trying to poison her husband’s pregnant mistress by repeatedly spreading mildly toxic chemicals on her doorknob and car-door handles. The victim spotted most of the chemicals and suffered only a minor burn to her thumb, but Bond was sentenced to six years in prison for violating a federal statute passed to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and five of his colleagues, said federal prosecutors’ interpretation of the chemical weapons statute stretched Congress’s authority so far that the court would not read the law that way absent clearer indications that was lawmakers’ intent.

“The global need to prevent chemical warfare does not require the Federal Government to reach into the kitchen cupboard, or to treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “Bond’s crime could hardly be more unlike the uses of mustard gas on the Western Front or nerve agents in the Iran-Iraq war that form the core concerns of that [chemical weapons] treaty.”

Roberts wrote that Bond clearly did not intend to kill the mistress, Myrlinda Haines, and that the government’s position in the case would transform almost any hostile act involving chemicals into a chemical attack.

“Any parent would be guilty of a serious federal offense—possession of a chemical weapon—when, exasperated by the children’s repeated failure to clean the goldfish tank,he considers poisoning the fish with a few drops of vinegar,” the chief justice wrote. “We are reluctant to ignore the ordinary meaning of ‘chemical weapon’ when doing so would transform a statute passed to implement the international Convention on Chemical Weapons into one that also makes it a federal offense to poison goldfish.”

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito filed concurring opinions concluding that Bond’s conduct was clearly a violation of the federal statute and the court’s majority twisted the law’s words to find otherwise. Scalia, Thomas and Alito said they would hold the statute unconstitutional.

“Thanks to the Court’s revisions, the Act, which before was merely broad, is now broad and unintelligible,” Scalia wrote in a withering critique of the majority’s view. He said the statute clearly defined what constituted a chemical weapon and the substances Bond used clearly did, but the majority crafted out of whole cloth an extra test that the chemicals also needed to be “of the sort that an ordinary person would associate with instruments of chemical warfare.”

The case had drawn the attention of conservative legal scholars because the Justice Department argued that even if Congress wouldn’t ordinarily have the power to criminalize Bond’s conduct, lawmakers could do so under the Constitution because the Senate-ratified treaty expanded Congressional authority.

However, the court’s majority dodged that issue Monday in a ruling in keeping with Roberts’s publicly stated preference for the court to issue narrow decisions whenever feasible.

“If [the statute] reached Bond’s conduct, it would mark a dramatic departure from [our] constitutional structure and a series reallocation of criminal law enforcement authority between the Federal Government and the States,” Roberts wrote. “Absent a clear statement of that purpose,we will not presume Congress to have authorized such a stark intrusion into traditional state authority.”